A recently published paper by Birch et al. (2024) in the Journal of Applied Ecology with Torbjørn Haugaasen (member of the TFA Steering Committee) as one of the authors contributes to the debate around land sharing vs. land sparing.
Those two different strategies are central to the debate regarding agricultural development: one integrates farming and conservation (land sharing), and the other separates farming and conservation, intensifying production to allow the offset of natural habitat (land sparing).
The role of wildlife-friendly habitat in the wider surrounding landscape (landscape wildlife friendliness) in promoting farmland diversity has been presented as a potentially unexplored benefit of land sharing.
Birch et al. sampled birds across primary forests and cattle pastures in the western Amazon, testing the hypothesis that increased landscape wildlife friendliness will lead to increased species richness on farmland, even at low levels of ‘on-farm’ wildlife-friendly habitat.
They found that while there is a minor increase in species richness linked to increased levels of landscape wildlife friendliness, a large component of the avian community is functionally absent. Most forest-dependent species are missing from pasture, even at high levels of farm wildlife friendliness. For these species, the preservation of blocks of contiguous forest under land sparing is vastly superior.
Across different production levels, land sparing always retained significantly higher species richness than land sharing, regardless of the level of landscape wildlife friendliness.
As a take-away message, landscape wildlife friendliness provided through land sharing is of limited benefit to many tropical forest-dependent species that are unable to move across or utilise pasture, even at high levels of farm and landscape wildlife friendliness. Subsequently, the authors advocate for urgent implementation of sustainable intensification mechanisms to increase farmland productivity while enabling the protection of large blocks of spared natural habitat to ensure the persistence of these forest-dependent species.
You can read the entire article here: (text above adapted from article abstract)